Jill Stein rigged the election for Trump

[Kevin Baas]

"Stein is seeking to pay for the recount of Wisconsin's election to make sure that the election wasn't rigged in some way against Democrat Hillary Clinton. Stein herself received about 31,000 votes in Wisconsin, more than the margin separating Clinton and Trump." -- http://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/11/28/elections-staff-layout-recount-timeline/94539210/

In other words, Jill Stein spoiled enough ballots to change the winner from Hillary to Trump.  Essentially rigging the election.

[Warren D Smith]

neither Stein nor Johnson (nor combined) swung
the election, because CBS exit polls
showed 3rd party voters would have voted 10% more for Clinton
than Trump, which together with the official results
indicated via simple arithmetic that the only state "spoiled" was Michigan.
Trump still would have won if Stein and/or Johnson had dropped out.



--
Warren D. Smith
http://RangeVoting.org <-- add your endorsement (by clicking
"endorse" as 1st step)

[William Waugh]

How could Stein spoil even two ballots? In any event, unfortunately, the article does not take comments. I would like to know the writers' grounds or evidence for asserting that Stein's motivation was "to make sure that the election wasn't rigged in some way against Democrat Hillary Clinton." Any mention of favoring Hillary would be inconsistent with Stein's messaging about this project everywhere else I have seen her quoted. To my mind, the possible benefit of the project is that drawing public attention to the defeat of one aspect of vote rigging (flipping the votes by machine) can by extension lead people to notice the other aspects (e. g. voting systems that split the opposition vote).

[Kevin Baas]

Mentioning support for a candidate would not preclude the possiblity of a general interest in making sure the election was not rigged.  

Nor would it have any impact on how well doing a recount would be able to ensure that.

Clearly there's no danger of the election having been rigged against Trump.  If it was, it failed.  Though trump seems to think it was...

[William Waugh]

I agree with all that, but in general Stein does not support HRC. Stein consistently expresses strong opposition to policies that HRC favors or has carried out in her offices. I think the newspaper is misrepresenting Stein's expressed motivations in a way that would tend to discredit Stein unfairly.

On Wednesday, November 30, 2016 at 10:12:52 AM UTC-5, Kevin Baas wrote:

Mentioning support for a candidate would not preclude the possibility of a general interest in making sure the election was not rigged.  

Nor would it have any impact on how well doing a recount would be able to ensure that.

...

[Kevin Baas]

Perhaps "not trump" would be more accurate, but she ran in the election knowing she'd take more votes from hillary than trump and had no chance of winning, so clearly that's not accurate.

[William Waugh]

What is a candidate supposed to do if that candidate is in the political opposition to the oligarchic parties? Not run? What is a voter supposed to do who finds herself in agreement with an opposition candidate rather than an oligarchic candidate? Vote for an oligarchic candidate anyway? How did Stein know she had no chance of winning? If sufficient count of people in sufficient States by electoral weight had voted for her, she would have won. The only excuse I would accept from someone who voted against here is if they say they don't agree with her policy positions.

[Kevin Baas]

What is a candidate supposed to do if that candidate is in the political opposition to the oligarchic parties? Not run?

> That depends on the voting system and the expected vote counts, and whether one of the candidates in the major parties is Donald Trump.  In a single winner first-past-the-post system, yes, not run.  If one of the candidates id Donald Trump, yes, not run.

What is a voter supposed to do who finds herself in agreement with an opposition candidate rather than an oligarchic candidate?

> In a single winner first-past-the-post system, vote for one of the two major parties.  If one of the candidates id Donald Trump, vote for the other one.

How did Stein know she had no chance of winning?

> Your'e joking, right?

The only excuse I would accept from someone who voted against here is if they say they don't agree with her policy positions.

> And you made this comment in a forum about mathematics of voting systems...

[Warren D Smith]

The mathematical fact based on (a) official vote counts
and (b) exit polls about 2nd choices is:
definitely neither Stein nor Johnson nor their-combination
was a spoiler.

However, what the media and all you here, so far have neglected to point
out is: there is a good chance CLINTON was a spoiler.
I.e. she, by running, prevented Johnson from defeating Trump.
If she had dropped out of the race, Johnson would
have won.

Well -- really? Unfortunately there is little evidence on this question.
but I think there is about 60% chance Clinton was a spoiler
based on the evidence I've acquired.
Does anybody have any additional evidence they'd like to bring
to my attention, re this question?

In view of this, it really is ultra-obnoxious for certain Clinton loyalists
to complain about the evil spoiler nature of, e.g, Jill Stein.
For example, Kurt Eichenwald in Newsweek
http://www.newsweek.com/myths-cost-democrats-presidential-election-521044
said he'd like to "punch [Jill Stein supporters] in the face"
since they were not behaving like "adults," who had some sort of responsibility
to vote for Clinton.

(Not one word by Eichenwald about better voting systems, of course,
nor any actual
consultation of actual numbers from actual polls relevant to his assertions.)

[Kevin Baas]

Due to the electoral college, you don't need to spoil the popular vote, just a few select states.

I highly doubt Clinton was a spoiler for Johnson. But then again I never expected trump to win. Not reality-TV to be successful, for that matter, so I accept that my models of the world don't necessarily fit reality well.

I will submit, however, that Hillary was a spoiler for Bernie. Had we a system that could eliminate primaries, that transferred wasted and surplus votes, I suspect Bernie would have won.

[Warren D Smith]

On 11/30/16, Kevin Baas <happy...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Due to the electoral college, you don't need to spoil the popular vote, just
> a few select states.

--A fact I'd already taken into account. I repeat, Johnson & Stein
definitely were not spoilers.

> I highly doubt Clinton was a spoiler for Johnson. But then again I never
> expected trump to win. Not reality-TV to be successful, for that matter, so
> I accept that my models of the world don't necessarily fit reality well.

--the evidence I have is a pairwise poll showing Johnson would
have beat Trump in a head-to-head race conducted 8-9 October.
The problem with my evidence is, it's only 1 poll. So it is a low-confidence
conclusion.

> I will submit, however, that Hillary was a spoiler for Bernie. Had we a
> system that could eliminate primaries, that transferred wasted and surplus
> votes, I suspect Bernie would have won.

--Bernie would have beat Trump pairwise, unanimously
said over 20 polls.
And Bernie did better in pairwise polls vs Trump than Hillary did.
Bernie also would have beat Hillary pairwise --
but only if everybody voted, i.e. not just "registered Dems only."
So yes, I think I agree with you:
Hillary was almost certainly a spoiler for Bernie.

About the only way to dispute this is to speculate that if Bernie had won
the Dem nomination, then he would have been attacked -- and
for some reason more effectively than Hillary
was attacked -- and hence also would have sunk below Trump.

[Kevin Baas]

Nate Silver appears to agree with you that Stein didn't swing the election.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/jill-stein-democratic-spoiler-or-scapegoat/

(though his estimates are closer to my .. err .. feelings)

[Warren D Smith]

my retrospective analysis of the 2016 election is here

http://rangevoting.org/USA2016retro.html

and includes a section about Stein et al as spoilers/not.

[Neal McBurnett]

Re: http://rangevoting.org/USA2016retro.html

Thanks for this, Warren! The historical context and analysis is very helpful.

Here are some updated Michigan data that are really astonishingly disheartening, and expand on your notes.

http://www.michigan.gov/documents/sos/MIRecount_545037_7.pdf

In that report, MI actually calls out the final(?) number of precincts that are "not recountable", and notes that they are 10% of all precincts statewide. Yes, 322 precincts were carved out of the recount, and they are the 10% of all precinct results that are in many ways most suspicious because the number of voters disagrees with the number of ballots, or the seals on the ballot containers haven't been properly handled. When that happens, there should be an investigation as part of the recount, rather than for some reason assuming that the original results were accurate.

And then of course the Attorney General went to court and got the recount halted.

A travesty.

What we need is Evidence-Based Elections, as discussed in this paper:

http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~stark/Preprints/evidenceVote12.pdf

To ensure the integrity of the vote counts, we need to have voter-verifiable paper ballots, AND we need to regularly audit all elections, by randomly sampling and comparing ballots to tallies. Post-election tabulation audits are far more efficient than recounts. When the voting system can export its data in the formats we need (anonymous individual Cast Vote Records of each ballot, which can be matched with the corresponding paper ballot), we can randomly sample just tens to hundreds of ballots to audit a contest statewide, depending on the margin of victory.

http://bcn.boulder.co.us/~neal/elections/corla/

Besides that, we need better auditing of the chain-of-custody of the ballots, as highlighted by Michigan's failures.

Of course there are many more aspects of elections that need to be improved, as you point out.

Neal McBurnett http://neal.mcburnett.org/

[Warren D Smith]

The claim Michigan is making (as far as I understand it) is that if
the #voters and #votes in a precinct disagree, then it is illegal
to recount that precinct under MI law.

And these disagree-precincts by an amazing coincidence happen to
coincide greatly with high-Clinton-support precincts.

Now of course this law is like a dream come true for any fraudster.

I find it almost incredible that on the one hand the USA is claiming
the Russians with "high confidence" hacked both the DNC and RNC
computer/email systems and broke into at least 2 state voter registration
databases to steal their info, and did so under direction of Putin to
try to alter election for Trump, AND on the other hand, no need to do
any recounting or forensic election audits, hey, in fact doing so
would be illegal. And just declare a priori we have no worries.

If over half the precincts in Detroit are (1) "unrecountable" by law, and
(2) known to have been miscounted, we have a problem.

And of course, the media seems highly uninterested.